Guest Articles

SEO with its complicated world would necessitate you to have a good knowledge about its important aspects including the terminology “black hat SEO”. You have may heard about black hat SEO but you don’t have any idea about it. Well, to be brief, black hat SEO is term used to refer the utilizing of aggressive yet irrelevant SEO techniques that focus only on the search engine and not on the human users and usually does not obey the Webmasters Guidelines. Black hat SEO comes into a good number of types, some includes keyword stuffing, the use of invisible texts, doorway pages, adding irrelevant keywords to the page content and page swapping.Basically, the use of black hat seo practices are common to incompetent SEO firms and those who are seeking for a speedy return on their financial investments for their websites, rather than that of a long term investment. Practically, black hat SEO could result into extreme cases like your site being banned to appear in the results of the search engine.

As the number of individuals who demand for highly relevant and quick online information increases, Google, being the pioneering search engine, continues to change and update their searching algorithm constantly. This will help them give their user a more relevant and efficient search results. Practically, many marketers are employing SEO campaign for their website to obtain a good ranking on search engines especially in Google. However, you should understand that the most successful SEO services are those that are achieved with by using right and lawful ways. Meaning, the use of illegal and unethical “black hat” practices is a big no if you want to achieve your SEO goals.

When having your SEO campaign, below is a list of the most common black hat practices that you must avoid.

CLOAKING

Cloaking is indubitably one of the most common black hat techniques used by some online marketers these days. Cloaking is the technique that tend to deceive the search engine by showing different content to Google and take your websites users to a different page than where they though they must be going on after being able to click the search engine link. Example, your web code makes Google think that you are directing a user to a fashion blog when in fact your website offers information about latest gadgets or electronics. Practically, Google is not that dumb, as it uses its search algorithms to locate such kinds of activities, and if your website is detected, then it will be subjected to get punished. The penalty may include the lowering of your ranking in search results, or what is worse is that it will be totally banned in Google.

LINK EXCHANGES

This kind of technique is relatively irrelevant these days. Link Exchanging is pretty much as it sounds, agreeing between sites to link from one to another and getting a similar link back – these can also form massive link networks which are also “black hat”. It doesn’t matter whether you triangulate or anything like that, link exchanges are wrong in the eyes of search engines.

Today, Google had already changed their algorithm that discourages such activity – penalties are regularly applied for such activity. Now, websites must learn to focus on natural link building rather than that of link exchanges.

ARTICLE SPINNING

Article spinning has become very popular in the recent years. Mainly, article spinning is the use of submitting an article online, and then using software to spin the articles. Most often, these articles are solely created for the search engine and not for the humans because most of the time they are not readable. “Spinning” is simply the term used to mean altering the layout of the content, order of the content and sometimes just the title. It’s clear to see you are “cheating” the system and Google is not only likely not to rank such articles but also hand out penalties potentially for this.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

Copying content from another site is one of the worst black hat techniques one can ever use. Duplicate copy issues can also come from within your own website. If you truly need to have more than one copy of content (perhaps you’ve a number of blogs for a network of businesses and you share an article over two blogs) you can use a canonical tag to point to the one you class as original, this means the non-original won’t rank in search usually but you won’t be penalized for duplication.

Put simply, Search engines prefer unique content.

SPAM COMMENTS

Spam commenting is a kind of black hat technique that uses various tools to spam comment a post and try to add backlinks. In most cases you see this done manually and it’s easy to spot, but some big players have used mechanical tools and lets just say google wasn’t too happy. The other thing to remember is that comment links tend to be ‘nofollow’ and as such carry zero weight in search ranking, spam comment wastes your time and resources but it also makes your brand look really bad.

Remember when your were just a kid and your grandparents would sit you down and tell you this “true” story about some other kid just to get you to wash your teeth or eat your peas ? Well that was a brand storytelling just as any other that a company uses now a days. They told you an interesting tale, but in a way that was captivating, you’d never forget it and maybe it would change your behaviour.
But why was it important, to create this whole story around a simple little fact ? They wanted to you to do that one single thing. They could have asked. Unfortunately, kids listen to what their parents and grandparents ask, just as people listen to what ads tell them to do. Eat your peas ! Buy our product ! Yeah right. So, in comes the brand storytelling to change the impact of the information. In the next lines I will explain to you how it does this and why should you care.

The trend of brand storytelling

If you take a look on the internet every company or organization will say that they are shifting their marketing strategies towards brand storytelling. Most of them don’t, some of them do it poorly and there are cases that have been doing it right for years before this crazy trend had surfaced. The reason this marketing wave has appeared it’s because it works. It has always worked.

There a few basic principles of psychology that justify the great impact it actually has. As human beings we are naturally curious. That means we want to know, we need to find out information. But the solution is not through at us big bulks of data. “Our company is the best, because: long list of statistics”. What a brand needs to do is to keep us curious. To make us want to find out more. To not just be the receivers, rather to search for that information. And taking how we live in an internet era, making sure your leads and customers search for you on search engines is quite important. And here enters brand storytelling, to give your future partners the motivation to search. Andy has told us more about why this should be included in all content marketing strategies.

The second principle that has make this strategy work since the cave man, is identification. As humans when we encounter the tale told by a another we need to identify with something, preferably someone in that story. Why? Because even if we don’t know the details of the situation, what we’d do in that position, our conclusion in many cases will be “I’d do the same. I’d react like that too.” That’s what happens because we identify with that set of values, that character, which in terms makes us identify with the outcome. So good brand storytelling has to find the common ideas we have and present them in a way that the audience can relate. This is why every time a Virgin company launches something new or announces something amazing there is always a focus on the people – the featured image above shows the key brand figure, Richard Branson, is present but the photo is about the crew and aircraft, it creates a connection between you and the brand (not just you and Richard).

Now the final principle why this strategy has worked before the term was even invented, is familiarity. What do I mean with this is that it creates a coherence in the message you are sending about an organization, which hard to do. Your audience understands you as a whole. Not just a product or a service, but a whole team with a common goal and set of values. This doesn’t mean you should never change your brand. Your macro evolution is part of the brand storytelling. There would be no tale to tell, if there would be no changes. The steps you take, even if they strike curiosity, they should be easily understood for your existing audience and from the perspective of your core values.

Understanding your brand

So now that we have established why so many companies out there try to jump on this train, let’s see how they manage to do it and what you can apply in your own brand storytelling strategy.

Why does Apple have a greater success than any other company at selling the same kind of products ? You might say “because they’re Apple.” And you would be right, but what those that mean ? Simon Sinek does and excellent job of explaining on Ted what they are actually selling, what makes them Apple. Based on his explanation you need to find out some very important information in order to make your brand storytelling work.

Why are you doing it ? How you do it ? What are you doing ? Now just as Simon brilliantly exposed it, people buy the WHY. They can get what you are offering from anybody else on this planet cause they have an internet connection and shipping get’s easier by the second. Your audience does care how you create your product or service because it makes them determine if they consider it qualitative enough. At the same time they understand the major concept of your process and most of the time won’t see the little difference between you and your closest competitor. But the selling point is the answer to the why question. And that’s where your brand storytelling comes in place.

People don’t buy a product any more. They buy an attitude, a feeling, a membership into a different society. But how do you sell them that ? Well first of all you need to establish what your brand is. Harriet Cummings does points out the concrete steps you need to take in order to find the solution to this problem. From this point of view there are two major aspects that determine the impact of your brand storytelling.

First of all you need to know what you are. Each person in your company, each department may have different goals, ideas, pieces of the larger image that they take care of. At the same time you have common concepts and values that you treasure and which are there every step of the way. It might be something you all stand for or something about your work ethic, like in the case of FedEx. The unforgettable tagline “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight ” shows that they made a promise toward their customers about the way they work and they deliver on it each time. 🙂 And that makes for a positive brand storytelling.

Just as important is to understand what you are not. You can’t make everybody happy. And that’s ok. Your job is to deliver on the promises you make as an organization. When you establish the image you are presenting, pin point these aspects as well. When someone gives you a negative feedback because you don’t do those things, explain to them, that they are not part of the promise you are making to your audience in your brand story. How they aren’t connected to your core values and why you are not working on them at the moment. But make sure that they truly aren’t.

The second important aspect of your brand storytelling is understanding who you are speaking to. You don’t have to please everyone but you need to know who you want to touch with your product. Understanding this, pin pointing your buyer persona, acquiring the right information about them will make your work easier. You will know what they want from you and how they understand your message. Integrating their feedback into the process of creating the story will make it more efficient.

Owning the impact

The great magic of a good brand storytelling process is the impact it creates. The changes it makes on both sides. In your audience behaviour, because that’s what you were after in the first place. But also the changes in your organizations work ethic, your definition as a brand and the evolution of the company. Making sure that you own those changes, is the step where you make your audience realise you are responsible for those change in their lives and they are responsible for the evolution in story.

So does your business own the impact of it’s brand storytelling ? And what is your next step ? Waiting for your answers and questions in the comment section bellow.

There are so many different opinions on which strategies work the best for SEO, but in reality, all SEO efforts should start with extensive keyword research. Whether you agree this is the most important aspect or not, if you don’t do keyword research, you’re bound for failure. Let’s review the reasons behind this being the more important SEO aspect.

Getting the Right People to Your Site

All successful businesses have to have a way of getting the right audience to notice them, and with all of the competition on the internet, our best chance is to get them through SEO. Researching what your target audience types in the search bar can highly increase the amount of quality traffic to your site because you know that the majority of your target demographic types that specific search term.

You can also understand that even though some search terms might be within your niche, can work against you. Let’s say that you own an online hat store that offers great hats at a low price. You will get much better results and conversion rates by targeting phrases like “Beautiful hats for cheap”. If you try and target something that just says “Good looking hats”, you will only attract people that are only interested in looking at the hats, not buying them.

Each industry is different, so you will have to do your own keyword research to figure out what works best for your business, but trying to just guess which ones are good to target will only end in money and time being spent for nothing.

Trend Changes

Doing keyword research helps with keeping on top of your niche because you will also get insight on what your target audience is interested in next. If you notice that people are becoming more interested in another aspect of your niche, you will have a head start on your competition to meet the needs of your consumers.

People also change the way they search for things, so even if they are not interested in a different product or service, they might just be typing in the keyword or phrase a bit differently. Don’t let your competition start targeting those phrases before you do because then it takes a lot more resources to get ahead of them.

Phrase Difficulty and Popularity

A big problem with not doing keyword research before you decide to focus on phrases is not understanding what exactly it is going to take to make that phrase profitable. Some phrases and keyword are much more popular than others and the popular ones tend to be extremely hard to rank because so many other people are trying to do the same thing as you. Another thing would be the complete opposite, spending your resources on a keyword that isn’t used to much. It doesn’t matter which route you took, in the end you have spent your limited resources on keywords and phrases that won’t bring your company any profits.

If you would have invested some time and effort into understanding those keyword, you could have understood that you would have never made any money from them and could continue on to other, more profitable choices. An ideal phrase is one that people use, but isn’t too popular. This is because the competition is usually much less and you have a much higher chance of seeing profits and traffic from those types.

Keyword Research is Really Important for PPC

If you are running a pay per click campaign and haven’t done any keyword research, you are probably either paying way to much or are targeting keywords that are useless. Since these pay per click programs are all based off of what terms you want to bid on, you should know exactly what type of people will be coming to your site, your chance of conversion, and also be paying a reasonable price. No point in spending 2 dollars a click for the same conversion rate on a different phrase that only costs 40 cents.

Bottom line is, no matter what SEO efforts you are working on, you should have already completed keyword research on the phrases and continue to do research within your niche.

Ness is a contributor for make-a-web-site.com – a site dedicated for beginners and aspiring web developers. Head on to their site for valuable tips and information on how you can get started on your first website project.

In essence, SEOs are becoming all-around marketers. Advertising on digital landscapes calls for such. While a typical SEO campaign needs time to ultimately progress and influence rankings, some immediate needs can quickly improve visibility and rankings.

For example, an incredible content writer compose amazing and influential copy, making consumers buy offered services and products, but if pages are not properly coded and indexed, the copy won’t get in front of consumers.

Title and Description Tags

Search engines, like Google, are vast libraries of information. People use ‘queries’ when searching for information, doing the same online. If we were searching for a flower shop close by, we may use the terms “flowers shops in New York City” if we lived there, expecting results in our area.

Search engines leverage algorithms to read the Web’s information, providing it in seconds. While the exact intricacies of algorithms are unknown, we know they use signals throughout content to attend to a user’s query.

Title tags and descriptions are oft scanned and indexed, awaiting a user request. Do a search for “NYC flower shops,” and one sees results based on a number of elements, such as incoming links, but you’ll get results reflecting the exact query in title tags and descriptions as well.

A title tag lets a search engine know the main topic, or thesis statement, of a given Web page. Creating unique and diverse title tags increases a brand’s chances of visibility. Using a tool like Ubbersuggest reveals query strings used by consumers. For example, “long-stemmed roses in NYC” is a long-tail search. Such a popular search may warrant an entire Web page, with associated title tag, itself.

Description tags offer browsers a synopsis of on-page content. In some cases, search engines pull text from the page to better address a browser’s query, so it’s necessary to write unique and descriptive pages regarding products and services.

Load and Page Speed

Web browsers do just that – browse. Like consumers in a brick and mortar store, those using the Web know they have multiple options. If an aisle looks crowded or hard to walk in, an in-store consumer may pass it by. Likewise, if a Web site or specific page takes too long to load, a browser may desert the endeavor for another site.

Often and unknowingly, webmasters and coders lengthen load time with on-page and encoded elements. For example, the follow elongates load time:

Not saving images effectively

Using imports to call one half of style sheet into another

Using inefficient CSS selectors

Adding extra or unneeded HTML code

Several load time tools exist, which help webmasters determine the times of main and subsequent pages. With the addition of mobile devices and smart phones used by browsers, it’s important to measure load times of brand pages on all devices. For example, over 70% of surveyed mobile users mentioned encountering slow sites.

Social Signals and Shares

Social media continues to influence web results as well as the perception of consumers. For example, a high number of consumers admit checking review sites, such as Yelp, reading about what others think of a particular brand, service, or product before making a purchase or visiting a destination.

Furthermore, the Web offers a number of search options within social media sites. For example, if one wanted to learn more about women’s shoes, they could use Facebook’s search box rather than leverage another search engine, such as Google. In this scenario, a user begins to see broad and friend-specific information. If a friend wrote about a shoe buying experience, the researching friend is likely to be influenced in some way, possibly changing the intended route of their buying course.

It’s not only important to optimize for keywords and phrases related to your niche for your own pages, but understand widely used and well ranking review sites, such as Yelp, often appear in results first, over brand-related pages. Therefore, encourage customers to write reviews related to their experience with your brand. Furthermore, ensure physical stores and brand locations are optimized for local results. For example, a local pizza shop needs to optimize pages and online presence regarding a specific location, ensuring telephone numbers, directions, store hours, etc. are clearly made available and visible to potential searchers.

About the author: Janet Holman is an SEO consultant and social media specialist and she writes for Perth’s White Chalk Road . She enjoys sharing her research and findings online.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an ever changing world. It keeps on changing as the major search engines change or embark with certain guidelines or updates especially Google. Earlier, things were different and in order to survive in the SEO world, you were simply confined to follow few skills and activities, and you dominated over the search engine results. However, since past one or two years, things really have changed a lot in the domain of search business. With just one new update from Google, things really go upside down in search domain. This drastically change the way you chalk out your optimization strategy. These changes prove good to someone, while a curse to others. In order to come out in flying colors, the SEO professionals/companies are supposed to change and upgrade as per the pace of the changing time. These will simply help in making the SEO campaign a big success. Thus let’s check some of the skills you need to face the new SEO era as under:

Effective content marketing skills

Content has a prime importance in search engine optimization.

It is the content, which engages anyone over your site or blog and thus involves people in your marketing funnel. Hence the basic skill you need to have in the current SEO era is producing quality content. Content marketing can be further classified into two tasks- content creation and content distribution. The SEO experts should be able to have an edge over both the jobs then only he or she would able to embark with competent content marketing strategy especially content development. However, at certain junctures, you may find bizarre kind of thing in content marketing that appear in the form of keyword stuffing and creating countless pages with low quality content. Being a SEO expert, your role would be like that of a gatekeeper who can support the content ideas, which can really add some value in perspective of both target audience and search engines. The basic skills including keyword research, searching for content gaps and content distribution task would then come as a handy affair.

The Link Building skills

Permanent links carrying longer shelf life as compared to the temporal types of links

With the popularity of social media platforms since past few years, the opportunities to build up different links have simply changed a lot. You have certain legitimate and older ways of link building options including old fashioned directories, associating with credible sites and high PR sites, etc. These links are also termed as permanent links carrying longer shelf life as compared to the temporal types of links, which are secured via social media channels like blogs, content syndication, bookmarking and Twitter. The other aspect is the internal link optimization, which is not just confined to your own attributes but is also seen over the social media platforms including Facebook Page or Google Plus page. Having a good amount of content being created by several internal social media team, the task of internal link optimization can prove out to be a low hanging result, which you want to opt for. In order to sustain in this current SEO world, you need to be skilled in both the external and internal link building stuff.

Social media marketing skills

Social Media is no more a weird world anymore and play a vital role in generating traffic.

However, when you talk about social media skills, these are not just limited to managing a number of accounts like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube but knowing the art of generating traffic via these sites. The exercises for generating traffic, which can help in developing a well rounded SEO, can include things like creating fan acquisition strategies, optimizing videos over YouTube, generating Twitter followers, etc. Also, it deals with link building activities via social media, which is a bit complex thing; however, in order to prosper in the current SEO world, you need to know all these skills. You should learn the art of synergizing SEO and social media together.

Technical SEO

SEO is only about keyword research

If you feel that SEO is only about keyword research, well that’s not the case. SEO also deals with making your site better in terms of pages and making it perfect at the several levels as well in a most structured manner. Then only you would be able to embark in a structured way, which will boost up the changes of you being found over the search engines thus getting traffic for your site. Apart from knowing the skills of on page optimization you need to have a fair understanding about technical aspects of SEO including the codes. You can easily win the search battles if you have a fair knowledge about technical SEO. The technical SEO encompasses skills like understanding the server side settings, server response codes, sitemaps, rewrites, etc.

Final word

In order to prosper in the current competitive SEO world, it is important to learn and get an edge over different skills. These include few older ones and certain newly introduced ones. The above is the list of these skills, which you need to master to prosper in the current SEO era.

About Author Brianne Walter. She is a writer/blogger. She writes articles on Technology, social media, WordPress, Gamification, website development and online development etc. These days she contributes on amplify.

Note: the views in this guest post are that of the author and not necessarily of SEOAndy.